Can you understand poetry as a person on the spectrum?

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Dengashinobi
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14 Jan 2023, 4:11 pm

I'm wandering, since one of the symptoms of Autism is that we tend to understand sentences literally, then it's possible that we must have difficulty absorbing poetry. I was always very interrested in arts and I enjoyed them all except poetry. All my painter friends would gather and read poetry while I would sit there baffled. I've tried my best to understand but to no avail. I might say poetry to me is like the fourth dimension, I cannot see it. What is your experience with poetry? Is the inability to understand poetry a feature of autism? If you like poetry, which are your favourite poems?



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14 Jan 2023, 4:58 pm

I find those metaphorical poems boring and hard to.get, even though I understand metaphors and don't look at life in a literal way. I don't think I was the only kid at school who didn't understand them though, because when kids had to read them out to the class from a textbook they often frowned in confusion as they read, then they would laugh at a poem that was supposed to be serious - to which the teacher would yell at the class and had to explain to everyone that the poem was saying about trauma or whatever.


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r00tb33r
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14 Jan 2023, 5:00 pm

I tend to only get the simplest allegories.


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14 Jan 2023, 6:03 pm

I understand symbolism in poems very well


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kitesandtrainsandcats
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14 Jan 2023, 8:01 pm

Dengashinobi wrote:
What is your experience with poetry?

It varies.
In both the reading or hearing, and the writing.

Quote:
Is the inability to understand poetry a feature of autism?

That might be a question where the answer is, yes it is a feature for some autistics and it also is a feature for some in the non-autistic population.

There have been certain poems in the more abstract and impressionistic realm where my response to them could be characterized as, "Huh?"

Quote:
If you like poetry, which are your favourite poems?

Haven't read enough of it since back when it was required in school to have developed favorites.


I am in a local creative writers group which has weekly meetings Saturday mornings at a bake shop in our little burg's downtown.
We have a couple members who regularly do poetry.

I've written some poetry in the 20 minute timed writing to provided prompts thing we do at most meetings.

Going out on the insecurity limb here and saying that my natural style seems to be in the irregular meter and free verse realms.
Someone who knows me might or might not say different, but that is my understanding of my style.


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FletcherArrow
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14 Jan 2023, 8:11 pm

I get poetry and allegory, I just really don't like poetry.

I prefer prose.



Dear_one
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14 Jan 2023, 9:49 pm

It can take me a long time to understand some poetry, which I usually only encounter as song lyrics. When I try to write poetry, the usual search for the right word becomes so difficult that what works tends to dominate what I can say. I assume that the authors have the same problem to some extent, at least.
However, I notice that various form of poetry are incredibly popular as slogans and advertising jingles. People seem to treat them as more accurate, not less. I think this is because writing is a very recent invention compared to speech, and through all those years, a story told as a poem was more likely to be correctly remembered, and therefore true. Whenever there might be a lapse of memory, the rules of the poem would suggest the right version. It is like self-healing Roman concrete.



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14 Jan 2023, 9:59 pm

To be or not to be....that is the question...



ThisTimelessMoment
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15 Jan 2023, 12:46 am

While I can understand metaphor, I struggle with poetry. Listening to something in real time I cannot process fast enough to get the meaning. It becomes word salad.
Somehow song lyrics are easier. Why is that? Perhaps because they are usually less of a continuous, dense flow of words? Does the music make it easier somehow?


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15 Jan 2023, 1:43 am

I can.

But the level of how I interpret words and wording varies from how much I can access and use my verbal abilities, my current emotional states, the amount of references and knowledge I have beforehand, and to my own current levels of consciousness.
Mostly because I just heavily rely on patterns first before any 'meaning' arrives to a certain point.

Most at the time, I'm not interested.
Anything involving language itself seems to be my weakness. Sometimes it's a source of frustration.

Not merely because I'm autistic, but because I'm specifically a kind of autistic who do not have great verbal aptitudes like most aspies tend to have.


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Dengashinobi
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15 Jan 2023, 8:16 am

kitesandtrainsandcats wrote:
Dengashinobi wrote:
What is your experience with poetry?


I am in a local creative writers group which has weekly meetings Saturday mornings at a bake shop in our little burg's downtown.
We have a couple members who regularly do poetry.

I've written some poetry in the 20 minute timed writing to provided prompts thing we do at most meetings.

Going out on the insecurity limb here and saying that my natural style seems to be in the irregular meter and free verse realms.
Someone who knows me might or might not say different, but that is my understanding of my style.


Sounds such a fun activity. I also some times attempt to write poetry and my style is also irregular meter and free verse. I don't think I'm really good at it though, but sometimes i enjoy it.

FletcherArrow wrote:
I get poetry and allegory, I just really don't like poetry.

I prefer prose.


i prefer prose too.

Dear_one wrote:
It can take me a long time to understand some poetry, which I usually only encounter as song lyrics. When I try to write poetry, the usual search for the right word becomes so difficult that what works tends to dominate what I can say. I assume that the authors have the same problem to some extent, at least.


I also would say that my main contact with poetry is through song lyrics. often I don't get them either.

Dear_one wrote:
However, I notice that various form of poetry are incredibly popular as slogans and advertising jingles. People seem to treat them as more accurate, not less. I think this is because writing is a very recent invention compared to speech, and through all those years, a story told as a poem was more likely to be correctly remembered, and therefore true. Whenever there might be a lapse of memory, the rules of the poem would suggest the right version. It is like self-healing Roman concrete.


Maybe that's why i feel more at ease with song lyrics because the rhythm of the songs helps me focus on the words better and also remember them better.

ThisTimelessMoment wrote:
While I can understand metaphor, I struggle with poetry. Listening to something in real time I cannot process fast enough to get the meaning. It becomes word salad.
Somehow song lyrics are easier. Why is that? Perhaps because they are usually less of a continuous, dense flow of words? Does the music make it easier somehow?


I have the same experience, it just becomes frustrating for me to the point I don't really enjoy it as an experience. Song lyrics are easier for me too. As Dear_one said speech recorded in the form of poetry it's easier to be remembered because of it's a slogan-like form of expression and i would add that it may be also because of it's musicality.

Edna3362 wrote:
I can.

But the level of how I interpret words and wording varies from how much I can access and use my verbal abilities, my current emotional states, the amount of references and knowledge I have beforehand, and to my own current levels of consciousness.
Mostly because I just heavily rely on patterns first before any 'meaning' arrives to a certain point.

Most at the time, I'm not interested.
Anything involving language itself seems to be my weakness. Sometimes it's a source of frustration.

Not merely because I'm autistic, but because I'm specifically a kind of autistic who do not have great verbal aptitudes like most aspies tend to have.


language is a weakness for me too in general. Although i can communicate very elegantly when I feel like it and it comes to me naturally. But my eloquence is peculiar especially verbally. It sounds very academic for the informality of casual communication. It's more mathematically constructed rather than intuitive. It's during social interactions that my language deficits become more pronounced. Casual small talk especially in a group, is so fast and complex that i find it hard to respond fast enough. I find myself searching for the right words in my head while the other person is staring at me waiting for a response, so I become stressed and just come up with a word that is possibly the incorrect one from what I intended.



JimJohn
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15 Jan 2023, 10:28 am

Sometimes things are open to interpretation and sometimes they are not. I generally don’t like it when someone narrows the interpretation. It can be fundamentally ridiculous.

I generally like to interpret things and can do it unless someone else is judging my interpretation as wrong and then whether I am right or wrong is determined by the weight of the other person or people’s opinion.

p.s. I imagine what I just wrote could be poetic if it rhymed.



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15 Jan 2023, 7:17 pm

My teachers in English class would often enjoy my poetry work. Unfortunately, to the degree of making me read out my poems to the class as an example. It always felt awkward. However, I couldn't stand poetry that didn't rhyme. I always just gave up when it came to Haikus. One teacher liked my work so much that she offered to write a letter of recommendation and suggested that I enter a national poetry competition. I didn't.

Yet, there was one area which I struggled. Feeling without analysing.

"How do this poem make you feel?"

"Well, I think the writer was going for - "

"No, how does it make you feel, personally?"

"...Uh, sad?"

"Why?"

"Well, I think that the writer was using - to convey a melancholy feeling - "

"Yes but, without analysing, just locating why you're feeling that way"

"..."

"..."

"Give me a moment"

:lol:


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16 Jan 2023, 5:17 am

I didn't have problems with poetry, except for Emily Dickinson's "A Narrow Fellow in the Grass". I remember getting to the point of crying from frustration at not getting it at all. Mom (an English major & completely flummoxed) eventually just had to tell me it was about a snake. I don't think of snakes in yards/grass typically. I can't remember coming across one in our yard ever. Or at school. Or at a friend's house. I could see it after she told me "snake", but I don't see it in a modern context. I also got stuck on the part about "a Boy and Barefoot" because she's not a boy. Lol, the frustration is rising in me while looking at it to write this.



Dengashinobi
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16 Jan 2023, 5:31 am

Blue_Star wrote:
I didn't have problems with poetry, except for Emily Dickinson's "A Narrow Fellow in the Grass". I remember getting to the point of crying from frustration at not getting it at all. Mom (an English major & completely flummoxed) eventually just had to tell me it was about a snake. I don't think of snakes in yards/grass typically. I can't remember coming across one in our yard ever. Or at school. Or at a friend's house. I could see it after she told me "snake", but I don't see it in a modern context. I also got stuck on the part about "a Boy and Barefoot" because she's not a boy. Lol, the frustration is rising in me while looking at it to write this.


Hahaha I totally get you.



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16 Jan 2023, 8:08 am

Rambling emo freeverse, no matter how artistically presented, is monotonous, repetitious, boring, and generally based on one person's hatred of everything.

Rap is no better, no matter whose music has been "sampled" (a.k.a., stolen) to use as background.


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